Nevena Aleksovski

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& Maja Babič Košir

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Letters from the South

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Text by Àngels Miralda

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The mind has the tendency to flatten and simplify when presented with an abundance of information as an automatic defence reflex. Slowly, layers begin unraveling, levels come undone, and fragments are revealed in slow motion. It’s a static work, yet it functions like film, it functions like the slow and drawn-out process of healing, doing and undoing itself in a developing narrative arc. Sometimes diaristic, and sometimes composed of modified found objects, this mutable collaborative work between Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babic Kosir folds itself around the intimate and the urban space, the personal and the collective. The construction of individuality is also a compression of reality - no being stands alone in our enmeshed and entangled world. By nature, this ongoing collaboration refuses singularity in a firmly feminist stance towards acknowledging the collectivity of historic and personal struggle.

Around 100,000 women served in the Yugoslav partisan army in the first half of the 1940’s. An even greater number (nearly 2 million) joined the Antifašistička fronta žena (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front) which not only organised trained militias, but took care of logistics and organisation from medical assistance to food provisions to enable the ousting of Nazi occupiers and defence against Mussolini’s attacks from Italy. Like in other socialist contexts, the founding principles of the new Republic of Yugoslavia signalled hope for a feminist emancipation that, in reality, never came to be, always kept in check by the lurking shadows of patriarchal social order. In the post-socialist period, the legacy of the AFŽ disappeared, lowering the status of women even further than in the socialist post-feminist Yugoslavia of Tito. 

Yet, every resistance leaves scars, every struggle drains energy that should be used in other ways. War always leaves scar tissue behind on a collective level as well as on each individual. The uniqueness of human beings means that everyone chooses their own form of expression, like the  individuality of each fragment within the massified whole. Some call out with language, others in petrified silence. Like each rock in a cliff-face, each grain of sand on an interminable beach building a whole too large for comprehension. 
Nobody is the same after they come back from the war. They are a different father than they used to be, a different mother. Violence is absorbed as shockwaves to the brain. High alert. Tension. Cold sweat and other jugged interruptions into linear time like grammatically incorrect interjections. Yet there they are, surrounding, floating in the now, making themselves present and heard around you. Time is not linear. It is punctuated by the ghosts of a past that linger in our inherited memories, in the social fabric, in the erasures of a collectivised past. 

On an autumn day, a woman stands outside her house selling her last belongings. In an act of survival endurance, she sells her white winter coat as the last remaining option to provide for her children. In this situation, there is no future beyond today, but there is a long past stretching back through betrayed generations that has led to this dispossession. The shadows of the social safety-net promised by socialism is revived in the singular inter-personal recognition of humanity in others. The deep feminist gesture of empathy towards a stranger, of sharing whatever you can muster is an act of resistance against the cold numerical calculations of capitalist value.
    
Matter is not neutral. A found object is charged with memory, like the white coat packed tightly into a transparent vitrine, a reversal of worth into a symbol for human gesture. Without knowing the story the object becomes abstract, a mysterious placeholder. As much as a landscape, a photograph of the wine-dark sea, a face peeking out from under the pink quilted home for this expanding archive of collective recollection. 

At first sight, a monochrome, that reveals itself to be a patchwork of complexity. And in fact, a monochrome is an imaginary thing that is destroyed the moment it is put into practice. The surface creates bumps and shadows, the sun fades the surface unevenly, and a spider walks across the surface dragging silk behind its delicate legs. Like any multicultural country, finding true beauty is seeing the value in opacity, the unknowable abstract of the other, while understanding that the whole is only made by the unity of all of these diverse forms caring for each other. 

Sometimes, a collaboration just flows. There is so much you already share that doesn’t need to be spoken. On second thought, it doesn’t need to be shared - just acknowledged. Look into the face of another; without knowing the details of every grief, memory, and hurt that they carry, it is clear that we’re traveling a parallel journey of individual healing and collective repair.

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Maja Babič Košir

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Born in 1978, Ljubljana, SI

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Lives and works between Ljubljana, Sl, and Porto, PT

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Maja Babič Košir holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana and pursued advanced studies at EINA University School of Design and Art in Barcelona.

At the heart of her practice is the family archive, which she engages not to preserve, but to transform. Sketches, prototypes, and fragments of letters and notes are reinterpreted as sculptural gestures, tracing presence without sentimentality. In works such as the Love Letters series (2018–), found and familial materials are reshaped to explore memory, absence, and the lingering weight of loss, with the archive acting as a quiet partner in reflection. Through these interventions, inherited objects resonate beyond their origins, articulating traces of life, intention, and affect.

Maja’s process balances intuition with formal rigour. Through layering, assemblage, and spatial interventions, she constructs multidimensional installations that emphasise the tactile, sensory, and ephemeral qualities of her materials, challenging conventional notions of decorativeness.

She exhibits widely at leading international contemporary art fairs and venues, including the MG+MSUM Ljubljana, UGM Maribor, Cukrarna, ARCO Madrid, Art Brussels, SPARK, Artissima, viennacontemporary, NADA Villa Warsaw, and Berlin & Zürich Art Weekend. Her works are held in prominent private and public collections and have been recognised with multiple awards.

Represented by the gallery, Maja Babič Košir continues to probe the intersections of material, memory, and narrative, creating sculptural and spatial interventions that resonate with both intimate and universal histories.

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Nevena Aleksovski

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Born in 1984, Bor, RS

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Lives and works in Ljubljana, SI

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Nevena Aleksovski earned her degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Novi Sad (RS), in 2008, and furthered her academic journey with a Master's degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Ljubljana (SI), in 2014. She has showcased her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among others at ŠKUC (SI), RAVNIKAR (SI), Britta Rettberg (DE), MGLC (SI), Cukrarna (SI), P74 Gallery (SI), PrivatePrint (MK), NADA Villa Warsaw (PL) as well as at various international art fairs including viennacontemporary, Artissima, and Berlin & Zürich Art Weekend.

Drawing from personal experience, her focal point of artistic exploration always originates from the concept of migration, a phenomenon that has shaped human histories and societies. Her focus expands beyond migrant narratives to address the challenges faced by those labeled as Others in new environments, urging viewers to contemplate the human toll of exclusion and advocate for inclusivity. In her latest series, Southern, Southern, Aleksovski delivers an ironic message, exploring the dehumanization of people from southern regions through fetishized and harmful imaginings. Aleksovski's minimalist paintings and installation unravel the complexities of stereotypical views, prompting viewers to confront the implications of pervasive biases and fostering a dialogue towards a more inclusive global perspective.

In 2022 she published the book Melancholy of the Abandoned Lands, in collaboration with PrivatePrint Publishing, that tells the migration history of her family during Yugoslavia and after its dissolvement.

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